Deafheaven played Paradise Rock Club – 5/13
Metal shapeshifters Deafheaven brought their Lonely People With Power tour to a sold-out Paradise with support from Gatecreeper and Trauma Ray.
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Bay Area quintet Deafheaven have long resided a little left of the dial in the metal world, fusing post-rock and dream-pop into their throat-shredding black metal core, and that felt more true than ever with the release of 2021’s shimmering, shoegaze-indebted Infinite Granite. The project felt like a natural progression for the band, particularly heading out of the stasis of pandemic life, but it did beg the question of whether Deafheaven would continue down a lighter, dreamier path and leave their blastbeat bonafides a thing of the past. The answer arrived emphatically in the form of March’s Lonely People With Power, a summative work that unifies every facet of the group while putting an aggressive foot first.
Fittingly, this Spring’s supporting tour finds the band hitting the stage with a renewed vengeance. Their Boston stop at an absolutely packed Paradise was one of the tightest and hardest-hitting of the (many) Deafheaven gigs I’ve seen over the years. The set hinged almost entirely on the new material – featuring most of the record in sequence, with a handful of throwbacks to 2013’s Sunbather and its followup New Bermuda interspersed – and the adoring crowd went equally wild for all of it. Not that it was difficult to see why; leadoff tracks “Doberman” and “Magnolia” were pure force and fury, and the late-set riff-barrage “Revelator” might be the most ferocious song they’ve ever brought to light.
Vocalist George Clarke, the magnetic face of the band and one-half of its founding core alongside guitarist Kerry McCoy, commanded the room throughout with the signature intensity that’s made him one of the great heavy music frontmen of his era. As for the rest of the band – McCoy plus longtime drummer Daniel Tracy, Boston’s own Chris Johnson on bass (a former sound engineer at the Paradise, who got plenty of love from his old venue) and guitarist Ian Waters (an affiliate of the great Spiritual Cramp, filling in for regular axeman Shiv Mehra) – the unit absolutely locked in from every interlude to breakneck-speed crescendo. Truly the sound of a band operating at its peak.
And it wouldn’t be a proper Deafheaven show without a well-curated matchup of supporting acts, comprising heavy shoegazers Trauma Ray and death metal rippers Gatecreeper on this run. Both acts brought the energy, despite their respective downcast walls of sound and gleeful savagery existing on very different sonic spectrums, and made for a perfectly balanced night of in-the-red delights.
Check out galleries for all three bands below.
